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Every mood of a woman's mind is represented: now sad---
'Discordant is the music of a woman's life: pitiable helplessness is her lot, an evil housemate, indeed. There is the trouble of child birth, the trouble of woman's weakness.'---(Hippolytus.)
or---
'A censorious thing is womankind. If women get a small basis for scandal they soon add more. Women take a kind of pleasure in talking insincerely about one another.'---(Phoenissae.)
now triumphant---
or---
A strange and wondrous thing for women are the children they bear in travail. Womankind loves a baby.---(Phoenissae.)
All the questions of sex are considered and judged with clearest sense.
'Man's love when it is excessive is neither excellent nor, indeed, creditable. But still, sex is a divine thing and a gracious, if kept within bounds. A moderate temper, for that I pray: avaunt, contentious anger and the ceaseless bickering that drives a husband astray to another woman's arms.'---(Medea.)
Sometimes the question takes a wider range as in the difficult chorus of the Iphigenia in Aulis.
'The stuff of which men and women are made is different: their ways are different too. But what is really good, of that there is no doubt. The different methods of rearing and education have a great influence on ideas of excellence. Humble modesty is a form of wisdom; and yet it is wondrous good to use your own judgment and see your duty for yourself. Then life is honourable and your frame[103] grows not old. It is a great thing to seek after excellence. For us women the quest is secret down the secret ways of love; for men the marshalled state and the thronging crowd make a city to increase and prosper.'
But the topic on which Euripides insists most is the scandal of literature, the unfair ideas of woman that have been created and fostered by the perversity of writers. Two quotations will suffice. One from the Ion:---
another from the Medea:
'It is men now that are crafty in counsel, and keep not their pledges by the gods; the scandal will turn and honour come to a woman's life. 'Tis coming---respect for womankind. No longer will pestilent scandal attack women, and women alone. The music of ancient bards will die away, harping ever on woman's perfidy. Phbus is the guide of melody and in my heart he never set the wondrous music of his lyre. Else I would soon have raised a song that would have stayed the[104] brood of male singers. The long years have many a tale to tell, of men as well as of women.'
This last sentence represents Euripides' reasoned judgment on the problems of feminism. Women are different from men, but they are not inferior: all the arguments that are used to prove woman's weakness could be used equally well against men.
So we may leave the characters and turn now to the separate plays.
Of the complete dramas that we now possess, the Rhesus is probably spurious, the Cyclops is a comic play, the Helena is a burlesque of the tragic manner. Of the remaining sixteen, two, the Suppliant Women and the Children of Heracles, are political plays, written to glorify Athens as the champion of oppressed nationalities, and their interest is mainly political. But nothing that Euripides wrote is altogether lacking in vivid touches of feminism. In the Children of Heracles, for example, there is one character who in a few words reveals the position of women in Athenian life: 'For a woman silence and discretion are best, and to remain quiet within doors.' So speaks the maiden Macaria before she consents to a voluntary death. She has had bitter experience of life and she is willing to die, for existence offers her no very pleasant prospect.
'A friendless girl---' she says 'who will take me for[105] his wife? Who will have children by me? It is better for me to die.' Her one pathetic desire is to die, not on compulsion but as a willing sacrifice,---to escape from life nobly (the word recurs as often in Euripides as it does in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler), to leave the ignoble servitude of woman's lot. She begs Iolaus to deal the death-blow and to cover her dead body. But Iolaus, brave old man though he is, cannot bring himself to see her die, and her last request is that at least she may die not among men, but in the arms of women. These are her final words: 'For my people I die. That is my treasure in death: that I take instead of children and my virgin bloom; if indeed anything exists below. I pray for my part that there be nothing there: if we mortals who must die shall find life's business in that land also, I know not where to turn. Death is counted the surest potion against pain.'
A similar incident forms the most striking scene of the Suppliant Women. Here it is not a young girl, but a married woman, Evadne, who of her own accord goes to death. But her motive is much the same: 'for the sake of a noble repute I die,' she cries 'that I may surpass all women in generous courage.' Her husband is dead, she is a childless woman, and she refuses to live on as a widow. Her father is anxious that she should nurse him in his old age, but with strange perversity she prefers death and[106] the old man is left to make lament. 'My daughter is dead;' he cries, 'she who used to draw down my face to her lips and would hold my head fast in her arms. Nothing is so sweet as a daughter when a father grows old. A son's life is a thing of greater importance, but sons are not so pleasant when we need fond endearments.'
The main interest of the Suppliant Women is the same as that of three other plays: the Phoenician Women, the Trojan Women, and the Hecuba. They are concerned with war; but war, as seen from the woman's side, a thing of unredeemed and useless suffering. All the 'glory of conquest' disappears: women and children are seen paying the price of men's ambition and pride. The Trojan Women is the most lamentable and the most effective of the series. Written according to the oldest formula of tragedy, the chorus are the chief persons in the action. Hecuba, Cassandra and Andromache are only particular representatives of the sufferings which all the women in the play endure. The two male characters, the lustful hypocrite Menelaus and the honest servant Talthybius are of quite subordinate interest.
